With emergence of devices such as fiber channel storage devices and fiber channel switches, the storage field enters a new networking stage, storage area networks (SANs) emerge, and sharing of storage devices is implemented. A server may directly access data in multiple storage devices in a storage system using a storage network.
In other approaches, a server usually merges multiple input/output (I/O) requests before sending the I/O requests to improve data access efficiency. In addition, I/O requests that can be merged need to be used to access a same storage device. If the server needs to access multiple storage devices as requested by I/O requests generated according to one data processing request, in the other approaches, the I/O requests of the different storage devices may be dispersed to different aggregation instructions, and then the different aggregation instructions are separately sent to corresponding storage devices to complete read/write operations. To ensure data consistency, in the other approaches, a transaction mechanism is added to monitor and manage I/O requests of a same data processing request. Because times taken to process aggregation requests of different storage devices are different, a time taken to manage a data processing request using the transaction mechanism is extended, increasing the load of the transaction mechanism. It may be learned that a SAN currently requires a complex transaction mechanism to manage I/O requests of different storage devices in a same data processing request.